Anne Earney

The End of the Cycle

a short story
by Anne Earney

Erin's dad looked around his bright green front yard as if he were surveying a crime scene. "Have you noticed." he said, then paused.

Erin had no idea where he was going with his question, but she began to feel guilty - a reaction based on past questions. Her pale skin colored involuntarily. Have you noticed how bad your mother feels about what you've done? Have you noticed how much of an embarrassment that president you voted for has become?

"Have you noticed . there are no more crows?"

Relieved, she brushed her thin hair back from her face and looked around. Her parents' yard (two acres of mowed and maintained sod, two hours outside of St. Louis) hadn't changed much since she'd left seven years before in a fit of independence that proved fruitless, for she'd failed to make much of a life of her own. She had few friends and rarely dated. Every few months she came back to visit the museum of her childhood. The old yellow ranch-style house with brown shutters was connected to the pitted gravel road by a concrete driveway that wound through the yard like an umbilical cord. But there seemed to be little nourishment coming in, and nothing at all going out. Her mom's basset hound, Roscoe, bloated like road kill, snored on the porch. Houseplants, in the throes of a caretaker-sanctioned drought, lined the sidewalk.

"No, I hadn't noticed," she said. She looked around the yard again, then at the neighbors' yards, and the woods across the street. The tree leaves were deep green, thick and waxy. There were no crows.

"There've been less and less since that damn West Nile," her dad said.

Erin kept quiet lest she'd have to hear whose fault he thought that was. The Democrats? Marilyn Manson? She suspected he was right about the crows. She didn't remember seeing any that summer.

Erin's mom came out the front door, barefoot and in jeans. She squatted to pull at the weeds in the small flowerbed that stretched web-like across the front of the house. Roscoe nosed in to help. "You know, this year has been a great year for some of these flowers. Look at those." She pointed to a cluster of red spiky petals. "And those." Yellow daisies, in abundance.

Erin made appropriate sounds of approval.

Her mom got up and started to walk away. "Wait 'til you see the mint plants in the back."

Erin's mom had a thing about mint. When she was younger, Erin had been the only kid on the block to have mint punch, mint popsicles. This love of mint had passed through generations of Erin's mom's family, but had stopped with Erin's mom.

Caught up in her mom's wake, Erin pointed at the dry houseplants as they passed. "Those look like they need water."

"I know, I know. I just haven't gotten to them yet."

Erin looked at her dad. He stood off to the side and rolled his eyes at Erin. He seemed to be thinking, how much trouble could it be? Turn on the hose and it's practically done. Erin knew he would never do it for her. Every member of Erin's family was alone, forced to fight their own battles, big and small, win or lose. Yet he would be annoyed until she did it. Another tiny strain in their relationship, added to the deep fissure that ran down the middle. And it would take so little to mend it, she thought.

She considered watering the plants herself. Turn on the hose, water the plants, a smile on her face. Both parents would forget that the plants had ever been dry; the strain would disappear with the dry cracks in the potting soil. But Erin kept walking. It wasn't in her to stop and help, to so blatantly change the way things were done between herself and her parents. She followed her mom around the corner of the house, past the hose, without slowing.

The mint plants had grown into a bush the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. They huddled silently against the house.

"Amazing," Erin said.

Her mom looked angry, although nothing had happened that Erin could see. She didn't seem to notice the plants or hear Erin. Everything in the yard was silent. Unable to understand her mother, afraid to ask any questions, Erin ignored her grimace. She missed the cawing of the crows, now that she knew it was gone. She looked up at the big oak and for a moment she thought she saw the silhouettes of a hundred big black birds dotting the branches. Then they disappeared.

Erin filled the time left around her job (receptionist at a law firm) with reading (English mysteries and Victorian novels) and a volunteer position - she answered a women's crisis line one night a week from her apartment. The calls were forwarded from the Women's Center office. The weekend before she'd had the Saturday night graveyard shift - one of the worst. It had been a full moon and Erin had answered more calls than she could handle. By the end of the night her fingers were numb from flipping pages in the reference binder she used. Her eyelids were thick from tears.

One in particular still bothered her. A couple had called. Erin gathered they'd been dating and living together for two years, both divorced with grown children. They'd been out drinking. After they returned home, the man had hit the woman. Then he'd called the crisis line, which was unusual. The woman was on an extension listening so she could be sure the man wouldn't lie to her about the answer to his question. He made her listen.

"Isn't it okay," he had asked, "for a man to hit a woman if she continues to provoke him after he's said he can't take anymore?" He breathed hard into the phone, as if he'd been running. "Isn't it her fault then?"

"No," Erin said, "it's never okay to hit a woman." The words rolled off her tongue, just as she'd learned in training and repeated a thousand times since.

"What if she was doing something that she knew I couldn't stand, that she knew makes me angry, EVERY TIME IT HAPPENS-"

"Sir, it is never okay."

The woman sobbed into the phone. "Thank you," she whispered.

The man revealed more and more details. The woman had harassed him about his ex-wife. She refused to believe him when he said he loved her and only her. How did Erin think that made a man feel, to have his love questioned? He had told her he was going to hit her, and still she pushed him. She pushed him. It was her fault. It was as if he thought he could convince Erin, as if she would say, "Oh, well, in that case, I would certainly say it was all right to hit her." Erin wished the woman would call back when the man wasn't around so she could tell her to leave him. These men don't change, she'd say. She'd explain the cycle of violence, which she'd memorized, and the woman would recognize. But it was unlikely the woman would call, even if Erin suggested it, and she was afraid to ask with the man on the other line. Finally she suggested they both call back later, individually.

It bothered her that she would never know what became of that couple. Or the high school girl whose stepfather made her strip for him, or the handicapped woman who'd called in the few minutes she said she'd had while her abuser was out buying gasoline so he could burn her house with her in it. Erin would never know.

After so much noise on the crisis line, the world went silent.

Erin's mom jerked her head toward the backyard of the lot that butted up against their own. "There's Tracy," she said. A stocky young woman was bent over digging in a small patch of dirt, her back to them.

Erin and Tracy had gone to school together but after grade school, they hadn't been friends. Erin hadn't been close with anyone, really, but Tracy had barely acknowledged her existence in high school despite the fact that they were neighbors and had played as kids. But at their ten-year high school reunion the summer before she'd been friendly enough. She'd been pregnant. Erin was slightly envious at the time of all the popular girls who had started families. It seemed like everyone but she was married and pregnant.

"How's her baby?" Erin asked.

"Oh, the poor thing."

"What's wrong with it?" Erin watched Tracy turn on the hose and begin to water the lawn. The grass was brown over there, in sharp contrast to the lush green her parents maintained. For a second she felt as if Tracy had deserved to have a sick baby or whatever she had, but she quickly dropped the thought.

"You didn't hear?" Erin's mom turned her back to Tracy, and guided Erin by the elbow to do the same. "The baby was healthy, a beautiful little girl. We saw her when she was two weeks old. But she wasn't even one month old when Tracy's husband threw her on the floor during an argument. She's a vegetable now." Erin's mom blushed and looked down but Tracy was too far away to have heard. "On life support," she whispered.

Erin turned back around so she could watch Tracy sweep the hose back and forth, trying to give life to the dead grass. She was horrified by the thought she'd had moments before. Tracy seemed hypnotized by the hose, the water, and the movement. Erin imagined her, as clearly as if she'd been there on the night the baby was hurt (it was always at night in Erin's mind). Tracy had stood in the kitchen of her house. She'd argued with her husband (he was an office manager, a little overweight) about something small that should not have been a big issue. He'd grown more and more irate, then completely irrational. Tracy had refused to give in, even though she knew she'd better, for her own safety but, instead, she pushed. And this time, instead of his hand on her arm, or his fist in her stomach, or a hard pinch on her thigh, he'd grabbed the tiny baby from where she lay in her bassinette on the chair, where moments before Tracy had rocked her to sleep. He'd grabbed the baby, his face red and contorted. "No!" Tracy screamed, sobered up from her anger. She'd lunged towards him and the baby girl who, tuned into her mother's fear, had also screamed. He flung the baby onto the floor, where she lay, silent and broken.

Stop.

Erin's mom, reassured that Tracy was out of earshot, continued. "Of course, it came out afterward that he'd been abusing Tracy the whole time they'd been married. Mona said he didn't lay a finger on her until their honeymoon when he thought he saw her look at some other man." She glanced at Erin's dad, who was pulling weeds from around the fence. "I would have left your father in an instant if he'd done that to me. I would have swam back from that Caribbean island if I'd had to."

"Sometimes it's not so easy, Mom," Erin said. "No one thinks they'd let it happen."

"They took Tracy to the hospital, examined her, and found her body covered with deep bruises." Erin's mom shook her arms as if she had something on her. "How could she not know something was wrong with that?"

"I don't know, Mom."

Tracy watched the water flow out of the hose as if nothing was wrong, as if this was where she was meant to be, watering her parents' backyard. Her face was a mask of normalcy. She'd probably worn it for so long, Erin thought, that it came automatically now, even when it was unneeded, and probably unwanted.

Erin's father shuffled over to them with a handful of weeds. "Have you noticed how much more these things grow when the neighbors don't water their lawn like they should?" He smiled and waved at Tracy. "Sure needed it, huh?" he yelled over the fence.

Tracy waved back. Then she looked at the hose as if she had only then become aware of what she was doing. She dropped it in the yard, the water still running, and went inside the house.

Erin looked at her dad.

He sighed and shook his head. He let himself through the gate, walked across their wet, brown lawn, and turned the hose off.

On the drive back to the city that night, Erin ran through her mental list of calls she'd taken, people she'd tried to help, looking for Tracy's voice. It wasn't there. Erin hadn't talked to her, but that left a lot of other volunteers who could have taken the call. Chances were it hadn't happened, though. Erin watched the approaching headlights of cars in the other lane and wondered what went on behind the windshields, what caused people to value someone's company so much they would suffer for it. She wondered what she would have said if she'd taken Tracy's call.

Erin thought she'd had no idea what the world was like before she started on the crisis line. People suffered, but mostly in novels and on television. The dramas of real life were the little arguments her parents had; the real tragedy in Erin's world was a lack of understanding, not violence. She was baffled by the prank callers and "regulars" the line had. At the same time, though, part of her understood. She'd always been too shy to make real friends, and her parents weren't the type to help her reach out and grow. She held back with the people she knew, and consequently no one knew her. Before the crisis line, it had seemed as if everyone in the city, except for Erin, had fascinating, full lives going on, behind their closed doors. Now it seemed as if everyone might be abusing or being abused behind the same doors. The violence could be anywhere, and Erin couldn't see it, so she imagined it everywhere. She'd begun to doubt her ability to tell the difference between what she could know and what she only imagined.

But even if her details were wrong, there was no way to doubt the truth of what was in her parents' backyard.

She climbed the stairs to her apartment and looked outside. No crows dotted the trees or the grassy area below her window. The phone didn't ring - it wasn't her night to answer the line. The silence wrapped around her and screamed in her ears until tears poured from her eyes.

It was autumn before she went back to her parents' house. Her mom's houseplants were still on the sidewalk, still alive. "Aren't you going to take them inside?" Erin asked. "The temperature is supposed to drop below freezing tonight."

Her dad rolled his eyes. Erin's mom said she'd do it before it was too late. Erin wondered how those houseplants survived. Her mom had had the same ones since Erin was a little girl. She told herself not to worry.

It was too chilly to spend much time outside, so they sat in the living room and drank coffee. Erin, who'd taken the last two months off from the crisis line because she'd suddenly doubted her ability to help, asked if they'd heard anything about Tracy.

"Well, her husband's going to prison." Erin's mom reached down and patted Roscoe on the head. She took a sip of her coffee. "Better that than the death penalty. Prison's a worse punishment, the way they treat child abusers in there." She stared past Erin, out the window. "The baby is still alive, but nothing's changed. I don't think anything's going to change. But they haven't given up hope yet."

Erin turned around to look at Tracy's parents' house. The backyard was empty and the house was a blank wall of white, except for the blue afternoon sky reflected in the glass of the windows. As she watched, black dots began to appear, first in the reflected blue sky and then all over the lawn as they floated down from above. Erin looked at her dad. "Crows!" She pointed at them through the window.

They all stood up to look. Erin's dad said he'd put corn out for them, just in case they migrated down from the north, as they always had before.

Erin's mom opened the door for Roscoe, who bounded out and startled the birds. He barked as he circled the yard and the crows started up a symphony of cawing as they circled overhead and waited for him to tire. When he flopped down, worn out from the effort of hauling his long sausage body around, the crows settled back onto the lawn as if they'd never been anywhere else.

Erin looked at Tracy's parent's house and imagined that Tracy stood behind one of the blue-sky reflections. She would be able to see Erin's family standing behind the plate glass of their living room window, would be able to hear the crows in the yard below. Erin imagined that the last time Tracy had seen a crow, it had been dead, lying in her yard, and she'd held her baby daughter up high, as if the crow might be dangerous, even though she knew they couldn't catch West Nile that way.

Then their lives had changed forever.

Suddenly the crows took flight again. Roscoe flattened his head to the ground as if he knew they weren't playing this time. The big black bodies were born up in circles by their wide, thin wings pushing down against the air. They formed a whirling vortex of black but one crow in particular drew Erin's attention. He seemed bigger and darker than the rest. He dove out of the spiral of crows and with one great flap of his wings, he careened towards the back of the house on the other side of the fence. Not slowing or turning, he crashed through the glass of a window. Sunlight reflected from the falling shards and Tracy was revealed. She stood perfectly still, as if the glass hadn't dropped, as if she hadn't been exposed. As if she felt the mask of her face kept her hidden and protected. She turned her head slightly and the light reflected streams of tears that lined her face.

Erin broke away from her parents and walked to the back door. The round knob was solid and cold in her hand; the door was heavy as she pushed out into the world. She crossed the backyard, now empty again; the crows had flown off when the glass broke. She unlatched the gate, stepped into Tracy's parents' brown yard, and re-latched the gate. She stopped and looked up at Tracy, who stood at the hole in the wall where the window had been, her gaze unfocused on some point above Erin's parents' house. Erin walked up the slight incline to the back door. She knocked, and without waiting for an answer, twisted the knob and stepped inside. The floor plan of house was identical to Erin's parents' house. It took her no time at all to reach Tracy.